A Safe Pair of Hands

Clark's second job in the private sector arrives with a suspicious amount of ease. Work that good doesn't usually fall into a disgraced ex-copper's lap, and the episode wants you to notice. Naylor is on hand to help, which is either a kindness or a carefully placed piece on Deakin's board. But the question of who is pulling the strings hangs over everything.

J. C. Wilsher and Steve Griffiths wrote it, Alan Dossor directed, and the personal weather is heavy. Naylor is struggling to hold himself together after the death of his wife, and Tom Georgeson plays grief as something worn on the surface, visible in every gesture. Connell's career in the Met is hanging by a thread, and Siobhan Redmond gives her the quiet fury of someone watching her life's work wobble.

Clark, meanwhile, accepts his first investigation as a private operator, after spending the opening of the season drifting through the edges of the espionage world. The new supporting cast, Nasser Memarzia's Hagopian, Dominic Rowan's Barry, Laurance Rudic's Gilan, gives the episode a rootless, international feel, a long way from Mulberry Street. The guest list runs a little deeper: Avi Nassa's Guzman and Kristin Marks's Kaplan round out the same rootless world, and Barbara Wilshere's Kate Roberts is on the fringes, a reminder of the domestic thread running under the espionage.

It's a transitional episode, and it knows it. The old certainties are gone, the new arrangement isn't settled, and the two men at the centre of it, Clark and Naylor, are both adrift in their different ways. Whether Deakin set them up is left open, which is exactly how it should be. Some questions are better left to breathe. The espionage flavour is new but the show wears it well, and the episode earns its ambiguity honestly. Nobody here is allowed to be simply good or simply bad, which is the series' oldest habit and still its best one. The safe pair of hands of the title turns out to be nobody in particular.